The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency plans to prolong the life of an aging reactor by 10 years, although legislation in the Diet will likely end up limiting the extension period to three years.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency plans to prolong the life of an aging reactor by 10 years, although legislation in the Diet will likely end up limiting the extension period to three years.
NISA is set to approve the 10-year extension for the 39-year-old No. 2 reactor at Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Mihama nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture, saying no major problems have turned up in safety checks conducted by a team of experts since November.
Kansai Electric filed the extension request with NISA in July last year, a year before the No. 2 reactor marks 40 years in operation.
However, a government-sponsored bill, aimed at revising the nuclear reactor regulation law in light of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, carries a provision that limits the life of the nation’s reactors to 40 years, in principle.
But the bill allows for an extension of three years in special cases as a provisional measure for reactors that have been in operation for more than 40 years at the time of the legislation’s enforcement.
The government has submitted the bill to the Diet and plans to enact it in January 2013.
However, Diet deliberations on the bill have yet to start because of stalling tactics by the opposition parties, which control the Upper House and are more focused on demanding that Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda dissolve the Lower House and call a snap election.
The government had planned to replace NISA with a new nuclear watchdog in April, but that bill also remained idle because of differences between the ruling and opposition camps.
Therefore, NISA is continuing its tasks under the existing rules, which stipulate that nuclear plant operators are required to gain NISA approval to renew their licenses every 10 years if they want to operate reactors for more than 30 years.
If approved, the No. 2 reactor at the Mihama plant would be the fourth reactor in Japan to continue operating for more than 40 years.
The three others are the No. 1 reactor at the Tsuruga nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture, run by Japan Atomic Power Co., the No. 3 reactor at the Mihama nuclear plant--and the now-crippled No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
(This article was written by Jin Nishikawa and Ryuta Koike.)